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Recent blog entries by rw2

Signing off. The trust metric doesn't work well enough to
suit me. The only way that you can get bumped up, it seems,
is to maintain a diary. A laborious and boring process.
Who the hell wants to read the details of what I do, yet,
some must as they have bothered and then certified me.

Thinking some more about the trust thing I've decided that
the whole scheme using 'open source contributions' as the
basis for certification is
completely orthogonal to the problem of keeping the signal
boosted on a message board.

After all someone with a Masters in English (and I have
someone in mind who fits this example perfectly) might be
able to comment quite well on technology issues, or even
open source itself. They would, should the certifications
be accurate, be unable to post though.

OTOH, I, which would most fairly be called a 'Master' in
this system by virtue of the amount of time I spend on
cetus-links.org and other open source projects (easily 40
hours a week both paid on non), am not always to most
interesting guy to listen to rant on a given topic.

I'm reading a couple threads today and was caught by the one
on the old boys network. As someone who has been
contributing to open source for a long time in one form or
another I too am concerned by what I see here.

Specifically, the trust here seems more like viral marketing
than 'real' trust. I see the path of least resistance to
being able to post here to be getting a few friends who are
familar with my work to log on an cert me because I haven't
a good way to associate with the folks already online.

An interesting way to build traffic, but not quite to the
sweet spot yet.

Which brings me to the article on /.

A lot of the folks seemed to think that it was simply too
big. I disagree. As a moderator I'll switch to -1 for the
good of the community, but otherwise switching to 2 or 3
filters out the cruft quite nicely. If a thread looks
interesting then pop the filter down and see more. The
scaling that means every topic recieved 200 posts also means
that I can delve deeper when something catches my eye.

That sweet spot?

Something in between the two sites. Let everyone post, but
rate people and posts. Not just people. Not just posts.

This way the cruft gets filtered out on a topic by topic
basis, but over time the human cream rises to the top and I
can filter that was also.